What does Twitter think of this? Well, Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, spoke with Charlie Rose and the topic came up, naturally. Check out from 27:30 to hear specific API conversation, but CNET sums it up nicely:

“As our users were starting to adopt Twitter on more than one platform…we realized we have to have a consistent owned and operated experience,” Costolo told Rose. What “we tried to message the ecosystem is, there are all these value added services that we’d like you to start building that our customers and users are going to want…like large corporate accounts wanting customer relationship management software, and there are already thousands of Twitter clients, there aren’t the need for lots of new clients. And that’s the migration we’ve been continuing down.”

Added Costolo, “The future of Twitter is that we’ll have a true platform…not just an API that allows developers to create an alternate Twitter experience, but an API that allows third parties to build on top of Twitter in a way that creates accretive value for the user, much how Amazon allowed third-party merchants to build into Amazon.”

But (again) CNET rejoins with a quote from the founder of TwitPic, one of the developers affected by Twitter’s new API lockdown:

“Twitter was built on the back of third-party developers,” Everett told CNET, “but now those developers are getting the shaft. I’m sure the pressure coming down from [Twitter’s] boardroom is pretty intense [to try to] control the eyeballs and control the message.”

Here Costolo’s full interview if you want to watch it. If you have 40 minutes free, you should. He also talks about protecting users’ privacy (they want to, but have their work cut out of them when dealing with governments), where Twitter will be in five years, how it compares with the other networks and dishes (a bit) about twitter co-founders Ev, Biz and Jack.